


Saturday Evening Post I and II

by thebasement_archivist



Category: The X-Files
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1999-09-30
Updated: 1999-09-30
Packaged: 2018-11-20 11:48:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11335062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebasement_archivist/pseuds/thebasement_archivist
Summary: Nah. It simply defies summarization. Besides, like the Beloved Pendrell, it's short. Take a chance...





	Saturday Evening Post I and II

**Author's Note:**

> Note from alice ttlg, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [The Basement](http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Basement), which moved to the AO3 to ensure the stories are always available and so that authors may have complete control of their own works. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in June 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [The Basement's collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/thebasement/profile).

 

The Great Dane & The Teacup Poodle by The Tenth Muse

Good Evening. Another Saturday Evening Post delivered to your mailbox, unsolicited. <damn> This one's kind of "different", too.  
I got sent down this road by TaskMistress CiCi. And it looks as if it will be a very long road, indeed. So take your anti-vert pill, hop in and buckle up.  
TM

Slashx: 25 July 1998  
ArchiveX: 27 July 1998  
The Great Dane & The Teacup Poodle  
by The Tenth Muse  
Rating?: NO-GM/ NO-YK (Don't want any of my GrandMothers reading this and don't want any Young Kids reading this either -- No one under 17 or over 71!)  
Summary ?: Nah. It simply defies summarization. Besides, like the Beloved Pendrell, it's short. Take a chance...  
Disclaimer?: Oooh yeah. I'm disclaiming more here than the eye can see. But as to the immediate concerns, Chris Carter is the REAL and LEGAL owner/operator of the X Files Universe (despite what all those rabid posters say on the newsgroups) and is probably not aware of what I have been doing with his property at night. Sorry, CC -- I cleaned them up and put them back just as I found them and I never, ever intend to profit from this. Sheesh.  
Expectations?: A few. If the Great Dane decides to take another pass at the Teacup Poodle, I'll probably have to let him off his leash and make this into a series.  
Dedication?: This is sincerely dedicated to CiCi Lean and *her* dedication to all that is fun and fine in fanfic -- and to the single, yet steady flame she has kept burning for her Lab Boy, Whazzizname Pendrell. :-)

* * *

The Great Dane & The Teacup Poodle  
by The Tenth Muse

XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOX

FBI Laboratories  
Washington, DC

Friday  
Quittin' Time

*****************************************

"Aw, shit! Here they come! I am outta here." Merle Jeeters ripped his lab coat off and reached for his street coat in one hurried motion.

He signaled frantically to the red-headed new guy.

"Pendrell! Move it! If you get your ass out the door in the next two minutes, you won't lose your lab boy virginity to the X Files."

Brian Pendrell looked up from the centrifuge machine, puzzled by his lab partner's suddenly frantic behavior. The bespectacled older man was scurrying around the lab, collecting his keys, wallet and briefcase. 

In two weeks on the job here at FBI Headquarters, he had never seen this kind of frenzy in the normally staid and bucolic Jeeters. What were the X Files? And what demands would this mysterious "X" force make on his virginity, for Pete's sake?

"Don't just stand there all slack-jawed and bug-eyed, Pendrell!" Jeeters hissed, chasing his tangled sleeve in circles in a desperate attempt to push his arm into his coat.

"You've got it on backwards?," Brian Pendrell suggested helpfully, watching the spectacle, blue eyes widening.

"Goddamitgoddammitgoddammit," Jeeters was huffing furiously. "I am NOT up for Spooky Mulder -- Not on a Friday. Not at quitting time. Nor any other hour of the day, day of the week, week of the year, time of the century..." 

The offending sleeve gave way -- with a grating tear of cloth.

Ah. "Spooky" Mulder. Now THAT name seemed familiar, Pendrell thought, still mystified.

Jeeters shoved his skewed glasses back on his beak-like nose and shook a finger at Pendrell, a hank of shiny cloth lining trailing at his wrist. "I warned you, kid! You're on your own. Spooky and his partner are on their way up from the basement, and I am NOT going to be caught in another Up-Til-Dawn assignment from them while they argue about the significance of green leather-eating goo on the soles of their shoes. So long, kid. You can be their lab boy tonight. Happy hunting. I HOPE I see you Monday..."

The door slammed shut while Jeeters' words were still hanging in the air. Brian blinked. The old man had left the room so fast, Pendrell thought for a moment he had felt a vacuum.

And in nearly the same instant, the door swung open with a concussive whoosh.

Brian Pendrell blinked again.

A rakishly good looking man leaned in at an exaggerated angle, flattened against the door, a cryptic smile on his lips. He seemed to hang there for a long moment, making Pendrell wonder what in the hell he was doing.

The man was...

Tall, dark and handsome. 

Pendrell squirmed. 

THIS was the famous "Spooky" Mulder? The star player in more tales-of-weirdness around the water coolers of the Bureau than ol' J. Edgar himself?

Pendrell had expected ghost-chasing oddness. Attic-dust peculiarity. Cellar-white coloring. Library-quiet nerdiness. 

This was MOST unexpected. 

The man was tango-strutting grace. Lithe lean lines. Pixie-sly behavior. Self-assured cool.

Pendrell felt the flush of blood filling up all the spaces between his freckles on his face just as he seemed unable to pull in another breath.

His blood was filling up other places, too. He saw the gilded green glint of Spooky's eyes on him and felt a bit dizzy.

"Breathe, Junior -- a storm front approacheth."

Mulder had straightened to address Pendrell as a whirlwind passed in front of him through the open doorway. 

The OTHER legend of the water-cooler wonderers: Doctor Dana Scully.

She was beautiful, too! Hair as flame-touched as his own --incarnadine. With, perhaps, some consulting magic from Lady Clairol, Brian mused scornfully.

He was speechless nonetheless.

But Dana Scully was not.

"If you can see your way past my partner's wry humor and past the hour hand on the punch clock, Agent ---" Dana Scully tipped her head to read his badge, which hung at an awkward slant from his lab coat collar. "Pendrell?"

"Yes, Ma'am. Brian. Brian Pendrell. I'm new here. Started last..."

"Hi, Dana Scully. The doorstop back there is Fox Mulder. Nice to meet you, Daniel. I've got some work I may need help with here."

"Uh... Brian," he corrected, as he started to lift a hand in an offered greeting. Dana Scully was already moving toward his bank of microscopes, though.

He looked back at the tall agent now leaning casually against the open door. 

<Fox? That's a real name?>

Fox Mulder lifted one dark brow aristocratically, and he gave a slight nod to Pendrell as if he had read the young man's unspoken question.

Spooky.

"Sean? Could you help me with these slides? I need to find a certain reagent for these specimen slides."

Dana Scully's voice pulled his rapt attention away from the creature at the door.

"Uh... Brian," he offered again. "I'll be glad to prep and stain them if you tell me what you are looking for."

Standing at her shoulder, he placed several trays of chemicals within her reach.

"Well, Brian, SHE is looking for evidence of delusional behavior --brought on by someone's contaminated chicken dinner perhaps? --I'M looking for evidence of little green men."

Mulder's voice was soft, smoky, teasing. And right behind him. 

Brian whirled, now wedged firmly in the middle of the X Files Team. Pendrell on Wry -- Sucker Sandwich. 

Mulder's eyes were twinkling. Pendrell got the impression Mulder wasn't here for the microscopes, or the stains, or the solutions.

He didn't need to be.

He already had solutions. He already knew what Agent Scully was peering at. He always knew. Wasn't that why they called him "Spooky"?

Or was there another reason to call him "Spooky"?

Pendrell had to crane his head up to look into Mulder's bemused face.

How in the hell...? Did Spooky just get taller? Pendrell suddenly felt like he was looking up from the floor. Like a teacup poodle being studied by a Great Dane in search of a toy.

He wriggled sideways, jostling Agent Scully, who let out a sub-guttural snarl that made his hairs stand on end. 

<Oh, real nice. The Great Dane, The Irritated Cat and Me -- the Lab Mouse?>

The Mulder Mongrel was smiling now. Petal-pink full lips. White teeth that actually -- glittered -- in the lab light? Pendrell ran his finger under his collar, peeling away wet sticky skin from damp Egyptian cotton. 

"This is absurd, Mulder!" Agent Scully's voice seemed to be weighted with a hefty amount of pique. Pendrell looked hopefully back to Mulder. Maybe now he'd be distracted from his Hunt-The-Lab-Mice Game.

"It's 'science', Scully," Mulder said evenly, never breaking eye contact with Pendrell. "Believe the evidence of your own eyes." The green-gold gaze dropped to Pendrell's crotch, and suddenly Pendrell wasn't sure what was being discussed.

He felt his face color again and moved nervously to put a lab table and a few hundred volatile chemicals between him and Mulder. He felt sure the heat off his face could ignite a Bunsen burner. Best to stay away from the flammables right now.

He stumbled backwards and found himself cart-wheeling over a rolling desk chair. Glass was shattering around him like hail in a summer thunderstorm.

When he dared to open his eyes, he saw the dark figure of Fox Mulder directly above him. Dang! Was the man hovering? 

Disembodied like some entity from hell?

<Oh lord, then send me to hell...> Brian prayed, counting the sparkles of gold in those eyes. The demon's petal-pink lips quirked into a crooked, knowing smile. 

Pendrell felt the creeping warmth of a blush again. Had the man HEARD him? Did he read minds, too? 

"Mike! Are you all right?" Scully was staring at him from across the room. How far had he fallen? The desk chair was toppled another six feet away, its wheels still whirling noisily in their rollers.

"Uh... it's 'Brian'," he said, rolling cautiously out from under Mulder and gently refusing the offer of an elegant hand to help him get to his feet.

<Oh Jesus, those hands. What's the saying about long fingers and feet?>

"Nice shoes, Brian," Mulder was saying as Pendrell slowly rose up. "Think I could find those in a 12 1/2?"

Pendrell gasped and stopped mid-crouch to gape at Mulder. The pretty bastard WAS reading his mind!

The petal-pink lips quirked again. The glinting gold was overtaking the green in those eyes. Pendrell was almost certain of it.

"Mulder, our work is not done. Not by a stretch. This batch has to have been contaminated or -- or something," Pendrell heard Agent Scully's exasperated voice as if it were coming from a distance. 

Fox Mulder was mesmerizing him! 

Or was he?

"Whatever you say, Scully. I'm willing to get more samples. There's plenty where those came from. I'd be glad to work through the weekend to pin this down to your satisfaction."

Brian swallowed painfully, his throat dry and constricted. He watched the legendary Spooky -- all innocence and charm now that his partner's attentions were turned away from the microscope. The man was part chameleon, too. An elf. A shape-shifter. 

Certainly, he wasn't human. 

"Mulder, you're not human," sighed Scully, making Pendrell jump at the sound of his thoughts spoken aloud. "You work every weekend! I have to be in San Diego for my brother's birthday party. Where in hell's half acre are you going to find someone to help you?"

The petal-pink lips pouted out ever so slightly. Boyish shrug of shoulders. Sly glance at the OTHER red head in the room.

"I think Sean Michael Daniel over there would be willing to help." Mulder's voice danced over Pendrell's nerves like ice water on a hot skillet.

All that coloring blood left Pendrell's freckles adrift on a pale field of white and pooled low and thick in his groin. He felt faint.

"How about it, Brian?" Mulder's question had to be answered. Agent Scully was beginning to look at him curiously. 

He hoped his voicebox would work. "Uhm..Sure, I didn't have plans." 

Egad. A voice rising and breaking like an pre-pubescent teenager. Time to dig a hole and crawl in, poodle-like.

"You're a better man than me, whatever-your-name-is," sighed Scully as she headed for the door. "Enjoy your weekend. Walk me to the car, Mulder?"

"Sure." The tall agent moved smoothly past Pendrell. Close and deliberate, moving the air like silk against the young man's face. "See you in a few." More silk in the deep voice settling over Pendrell's ears. 

Mulder stopped at the door, looking back coyly. "Brian -- right?"

Brian Pendrell nodded numbly. <Hell, call me Kibbles 'n Bits, if you want>

He swore he could hear a low soft growl and a laugh in the hallway as Mulder disappeared. 

XOXOXOX **FINIS?**XOXOXOX

 

* * *

 

Slashx: 1 August 1998  
ArchiveX: 16 August 1998  
Good Evening. It's another Saturday Evening Post.   
The Teacup Poodle's Alternative Universe continues on...  
Dedication?: This is sincerely dedicated to CiCi Lean and *her* dedication to all that is fun and fine in fanfic -- and to the single, yet steady flame she has kept burning for her Lab Boy, Whazzizname Pendrell.   
Grab your box of biscuits and read on, please.:-)

* * *

The Teacup Poodle Meets The Really Big Dog...  
by The Tenth Muse

FBI Labs  
Sunday, the Supposed Day of Rest

\------------------------------

Brian Pendrell tapped the crystal of his Seiko again. Nope. Not broken. It *was* working. The second hand was sweeping with mindless mechanical efficiency; the minute hand jerking with maddening accuracy; the hour hand lulling with bored indifference.

Time was standing still inside Pendrell's head though. He looked dolefully around the deserted FBI laboratory. Alone. All alone --except for the stern stares from the polished portraits hanging on the far wall:

Attorney General Janet Reno, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Louis Freeh and President of the United States William Jefferson Clinton. The patron saints overseeing the best of the best, the hallowed labs of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Bored, Pendrell cocked his head to bring his vision into alignment with the skewed frame of the presidential portrait. It had tragically sideslipped on the day that Independent Counsel Ken Starr had subpoenaed the Commander in Chief. For the past week, everyone in the lab had skittered silently past the jilted portrait, trying to ignore the new slant, not daring to correct it. 

The young lab technician sighed and jumped down from his perch on the one lab stool he considered his own after just a few weeks on the job. He pulled a soft cleaning rag off the counter and headed for the wall of portraits.

WJC was the President, after all.

And there was little else to do while awaiting the arrival of one Spooky Mulder.

There. President Clinton would be pleased; straightened out and cleaned up, he looked "in charge" once again. To his left, Janet Reno pretended aloofness. To his right, Louis Freeh scowled.

Pendrell shrugged and glanced at his watch again. Sheesh. He felt like a nervous bride, wondering if he had been left at the altar. He had waited here -- on a Sunday -- at the request of Fox Mulder for the better part of two hours. He was supposed to help Mulder redetermine the substance of some mystery samples that the agent had promised to his lovely partner, the flame-haired Special Agent Dana Scully.

Mulder had promised to have the samples here today. Two hours ago.

Brian Pendrell ran his fingers through his red hair peevishly. He was beginning to feel the beginnings of something that *might* have been annoyance if he weren't so darn good-natured. And if Special Agent Fox Mulder hadn't been so intoxicatingly good-looking...

At that moment, the door swung open and every pane of glass in the lab quivered. 

Spooky.

The Mulder Mongrel was here at last. 

Brian Pendrell's heart leapt to his throat for a second. Fox Mulder was battered and bloody and...

Just as sensuously stunning as ever.

Pendrell gawked, and William Jefferson Clinton sideslipped again.

Mulder's typically carefully coifed hair was wind-blown and tumbled over his brow. Mud scored his highset cheekbones and angular jawbone. His Madison Avenue/Federal look was gone, too -- replaced by a roguishly attractive disarray: torn, muddy jeans revealed a delicious piece of well-muscled thigh; a ripped heather-gray Henley shirt lay bare a perfectly sculpted chest with a soft spray of chest hair that had Pendrell wondering what it would feel like to press his lips to...

"Brian! Sorry I'm late! Our damn security guards had me hung up in the cage downstairs 'cause I didn't have my proper ID."

The young lab tech heard genuine regret in the smoky-smooth voice of Fox Mulder. Pendrell blinked, knocked out of his reverie on an Ode To Chest Hair. How could the man look like an trauma ward escapee and yet still manage to generate enough seductive energy to drain the rest of the room of its light?

'N-no problem, Agent Mulder," Brian said without benefit of a normal breath. His voice sounded like the last note on a spent concertina, he noted with chagrin. "Are you okay? You look like..."

Mulder shrugged and moved with his usual grace to the counter. "I got the specimens that Agent Scully wanted as corroboration for that last set of specimens we worked on. Let's just say my... uh... *source* wasn't as willing this time. If these samples don't satisfy my beloved partner..."

The latter part of the sentence degraded into an unintelligible growl as Mulder pulled forth a sopping paper bag, oozing green and yellow and red goo. Pendrell felt the hairs on his head try to curl back into their follicles as he watched the goo taint his immaculate lab. 

*This* was evidence handling a la Mulder?

He cast about frantically for latex -- gloves, aprons, face masks, pooper scoopers, anything.

"Sorry about the mess, Bri. I was ... ehm... under the gun, so to speak," Mulder said, dropping his voice mysteriously and glancing furtively over his shoulder. 

Pendrell's stomach began to do the peculiar little twist it had done only once before in his life: just before he passed out on the high dive board in sixth grade gym class. He reached slowly and warily for the dripping goo, trying to command it into beakers and containers and whatever else was available.

"I appreciate your need for caution, here, Bri," the Mulder Mongrel was saying over the ringing in Pendrell's ears. "But I'm ... uh... a little pressed for time. You see, as soon as security notifies my boss that I have arrived, my ass will be grass, and you don't want to be around for the trimming of the lawn."

"You don't know how much that particular analogy thrills my heart, Agent Mulder."

Pendrell stiffened. Who in the hell...? He and Mulder turned as one to the owner of the deep stern voice that rolled like thunder from the doorway. Beside him, Mulder went a bit slack, seeming to lose a few inches of his imposing height. 

With a newcomer's zealous knowledge of the federal organizational charts, Pendrell was quick to figure out that the muscular figure in the doorway had to be a director -- or an assistant director at the very least.

Oh, wait a minute. It couldn't be...

Pendrell sucked in a breath. 

The glint of fluorescence off the bare pate. The ebony glare of the dark eyes behind deceptively delicate wire-framed glasses. The thrusting jaw. The flaring nostrils. The imperial bearing.

Oh no. Not him. Not here. Not now.

He had been privy to this water-cooler gossip as well. Here stood another legend of the FBI's most unusual -- the REALLY Big Dog: Assistant Director Walter S. Skinner. The mastiff among administrative mutts.

Oh no.

Walter Skinner stood at the door, hands splayed over gunslinger-slim hips, eyes scanning the room like a trigger-happy sheriff who knows *someone* was going to be spending the night in his slammer.

Pendrell could only watch helplessly as Skinner's bullet-like eyes trained on him like the cross-hairs of a high powered rifle. His spine had already begun to go numb when those eyes mercifully snapped over to Fox Mulder. With a discernible ripple of muscles being coiled like a predator preparing to leap on prey, Assistant Director Walter S. Skinner moved toward his agent while Pendrell watched in slack-jawed fascination.

The man was a recruitment poster: Spit polished shoes; knife pleats in dark wool trousers, so sharp that they could seemingly disembowel the man if he crossed his legs the wrong way; a linen shirt so blindingly white it hurt one's eyes to look upon it. There were even meticulous pleats where shirt met trousers, Pendrell marveled: the man's clothes had to have been ironed on while he was still in them. Not a wrinkle in sight.

Pendrell was jarred by a movement from Mulder, a slow ebbing away from the advance of his superior. Pendrell scrambled to the other side of his lab table. If the coming storm was going to break, he was going to be in a well-placed position, geographically speaking, to make a break for the door and freedom.

Wrong move, Brian. Skinner's eyes snapped back to him and narrowed.

"What's your name?" the man growled as if Pendrell was the intruder in the unfolding psycho-drama.

Name. Name. It *seemed* like an easy question. 

Pendrell's brain had dried up like Death Valley in August as soon as Skinner had looked at him. What *was* his name? He seemed to have forgotten.

Skinner was staring at him. Waiting.

Nothing. Synapses on holiday. He clawed at his lapel and clutched his picture ID, holding it out to the man in front of him like burnt offerings.

The man's head turned, contorting in a curiously uncomfortable effort to read the badge that Pendrell held in his shaking hands. 

"Your name is ... 'Property of the FBI'?" the other man said with more than a tad of impatience.

Damn. Wrong side.

"His name is Brian Pendrell." 

Bless you, Agent Mulder! Brian screamed inwardly. Yes! That *was* his name! He remembered now. He fought the overwhelming urge to grab the tall dark agent and gratefully press his lips to those...

Skinner had turned to his agent though, ignoring the lab tech. Pendrell saw Mulder try to draw himself up a bit more under the weight of Skinner's renewed scrutiny. A defensive, yet comically useless, maneuver.

Skinner halted just inches from his agent, regarding the rips, tears, dirt and bruises. "Another working weekend, Agent Mulder?" he asked dryly with a lift of his chin and not one single movement of his jaw.

How was the man able to speak without moving his jaw, Pendrell wondered. Was that humanly possible? Was it some kind of voice-throwing trick?

Mulder seemed used to it, though. Pendrell saw his Adam's apple bob once quickly in his slender throat as he drew himself up again to answer: "Yes sir. Just some more of the usual, sir. You know --evidence gathering."

"Everyone else on the FBI payroll seems to manage evidence gathering without triggering the rewrite of major medical clauses in our health benefits plan, Agent Mulder."

Mulder raked long elegant fingers through his tussled mop of hair and delivered his snake-charmer's grin, replete with pearl white teeth. 

Pendrell gaped: did the Mulder Mesmer work on assistant directors?

Apparently not on *this* Assistant Director.

Walter Skinner's jaw appeared to lock and with a snap of his wrist, a skein of official looking paper unfurled, fluttering down the length of his flawless trousers, over his immaculate shoes and rolling to a halt at the toe of Fox Mulder's much abused running shoes.

"I--I know what you're going to say, Sir," Spooky stammered. 

"Not this time, you don't, Agent Mulder," growled the Big Dog. "No mind reading games this time..."

"That's a report from Chief of Building Security Kleghorn," Mulder hastily interjected.

"This is a report from Chief of Building Security Kleghorn," Skinner roared, color creeping up his neck from his perfectly-tailored collar. "It reads like a rap sheet of offenses against this agency's efforts to keep our agents and this building safe from the likes of..."

"With all due respect, sir, Chief Kleghorn and his security goons are responsible for fully half of my present state of dishabille!" Mulder's voice was rising defensively. Pendrell looked about nervously for safe cover should glass and chemicals start flying around the room of their own accord.

"Office fires, assaults on superior officers, breeches of security by psychos who write their security passes out on scrap paper, shape-shifting FBI impersonators who happen to look just like you..." 

Skinner was barking now. 

Pendrell listened with awe at the string of federal indiscretions related to or committed by one very special agent: Spooky Mulder. For a moment, he felt sorry for the agent whose handsome face was dissolving into a pitiful, puppy-like expression while the Big Dog raged on.

"And HERE, Agent Mulder..." Skinner continued, waving at the part of the report that hung closest to his knee. "Here, Chief Kleghorn weaves an interesting theory on how you may have been the actual person responsible for the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. He thinks you shot President Kennedy *and* he's sure you fabricated the whole Roswell/UFO scenario as a scheme to gain frequent flier miles on the FBI's meal ticket. He's hanging Global Warming on you, too, and I think he has a real chance of making that one stick." 

"I merely forgot my badge today, sir," Mulder moaned. "I was in a hurry. They thought I was a wild-eyed vagrant."

"Well, Agent Mulder, we *do* pay them for their spot-on instincts." Assistant Director Skinner slapped the report to his agent's bared chest where it stuck quite nicely, held by a glue-like mix of sweat, mud and blood. 

Mulder winced, and Pendrell flinched sympathetically. Assistant Director Skinner never paused: "Additionally, Agent Mulder, Chief Kleghorn is demanding that payment for his standing prescription for Valium -- as well as those of any of his guards who have had close encounters of the first, second and third kind with the X Files team -- be taken out of *my* budget from now on."

Skinner leveled a charcoal-igniting look at his handsome agent. "Imagine my pleasure, Agent Mulder."

"Trying, sir." Mulder shivered visibly, Pendrell noticed.

"Imagine what I'm thinking now, Agent Mulder," Skinner growled in a voice too deep to have come from a human.

Pendrell saw Mulder's eyes go wide, and the man shuddered again. Then the lab tech was stunned to notice a small smirk creep over Fox Mulder's full lips. "I -- I am, sir," the agent gasped and added with a hint of hopefulness: "Office discipline, sir?"

Skinner scowled and executed a military turn, heading for the door. "My office in ten, Agent Mulder." The door slammed and vibrated in its frame for an agonizingly long time in the vacuum left behind by Assistant Director Walter S. Skinner.

Mulder was the first to make a noise: a low, careful clearing of his throat as he sucked in his full lower lip and glanced over at the room's only other occupant.

"Busted," Mulder sighed.

Oddly enough, Pendrell didn't get any feeling that Mulder felt badly about the official dressing down. In fact, the man looked damn well pleased about it, his face flushed with color and his green-gold eyes flickering with poorly disguised excitement.

"Is -- Is he like that often?" Pendrell asked, still shaken by the AD's visit to his lab.

"What? Who? Oh -- Him?" Mulder licked his lips and glanced eagerly back at the door. "I think I can say without fear of contradiction that I'm the only one that brings out that side of him."

Mulder suddenly straightened and began tugging his torn clothing into some semblance of order. "Look, Brian, you heard the man. I've only got a few minutes. Would you mind if I left you with the..." Mulder inclined his head in the direction of the slime with which he had desecrated Pendrell's laboratory.

The WHAT? What exactly was it?

"Well, sure... I guess. What am I supposed to find?" Brian stammered, not as enthused about playing with Spooky Mulder and his Mystery Matter as he was two hours ago.

"Just be open to extreme possibilities, my friend," said Fox Mulder with a sly grin that seemed to hot-wire Brian Pendrell's groin into a life of its own. Mulder turned and loped with easy grace toward the door. 

Following the scent of Walter Skinner, Pendrell presumed.

"Oh, by the way -- If you find out, however, that it is just monkey pee?" Agent Mulder said as he paused at the door. "Then have the report typed up in triplicate and bold face and make sure it gets sent directly to the attention of my partner -- the Extra Special Agent Dana Scully. Okay?"

Don't ask, Brian, don't ask, his little voice screamed from within. 

Brian Pendrell gritted his teeth into a semblance of a smile and waved a weak good-bye. The Mulder Mongrel was gone. Moved on to an uncertain fate.

What was entailed in "office discipline", Pendrell wondered. Was there a section on it in the Bureau manual? Had he missed that course at Quantico?

He heard the creak of a frame and turned just in time to see the presidential portrait crash to the floor. Brian Pendrell dutifully rushed to gather up the President.

He couldn't be sure, as visions of Fox Mulder danced busily in his brain, muddling his perceptions, but it seemed to him that the portraits of Janet Reno and Louis Freeh now had a decidedly guilty smirk about their otherwise stern countenances.

XOXOXOX -- FINIS?-- XOXOXOX


End file.
